Mel Gibson hired Joe Eszterhas to work on a film about ‘the Jewish Braveheart’ — it’s ended in bloodcurdling rows

I
f Joe Eszterhas didn’t know a great character when he saw one, he’d never
have been paid the megabucks. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Eszterhas was
Hollywood’s top screenwriter, earning as much as $5m a movie, spawning such
indelible, if fabulously implausible, characters as Catherine Tramell, the
ice-pick-wielding, pudenda-baring serial killer who made Sharon Stone a
superstar in Basic Instinct; and Nomi, the lap dancer who strips and screws
her way to the top in that delicious paean to Las Vegas excess, Showgirls.

If you thought those characters were fiendish pieces of work, wait until you
meet the two feral beasts who claw each other to shreds in his latest
oeuvre: Mel Gibson and Eszterhas himself. Eszterhas has just published an
ebook, Heaven and Mel, which reveals the bizarre, often terrifying,
ultimately dangerously damaging relationship he had with Gibson. The book is
his account of the 18 months or